10 October 2013

Afloat by John Reibetanz

When it comes to John Reibetanz’s Afloat, you will never have a better
experience while drowning. The poems are a torrent of sublime flow. Water is
the conduit for the soul that connects us to nature, connects us to history,
connects us to other people, and connects us to ourselves. It is a completely
round and fluid book.

Some nature poets have a tendency
to alienate readers with a singular focus on nature without connecting it to
any sort of relevant context. Reibetanz makes sure that we are shown all of
life through the most important element needed to sustain it. “All nature wants
to be water.” Water is our essence; we want to be water. We want to be that
clarity. There is always a human yearning to become clean, wash away the past
and become something whole and uncorrupt, and this yearning is a
cathartic—painful but necessary—cleansing. “[I]t kisses you with salt.” Water
is not only needed for life but for our inevitable wounds.

Reibetanz’s eighth collection of
poems is a book of teaching and of song. It takes us back into our wounds, back
into history, using water to demonstrate how we have progressed as a
civilization. Juxtaposing ancient Chinese figures with the contemporary, he
comments and expresses concern for the direction our figurative water is headed
and what it might mean.

Through a constant flow of
beautiful imagery, a musical mash-up of words resounds. The form takes on its
own kind of ripple effect. With intentional spacing added to each line, every
piece guides your eyes to move at a specific rhythm. There is a clean depth to
this work. The surface of Afloat is
the surface of a healthy lake, where you can see to the bottom. If you let the
waves of each line carry you, you will see to the depths of each piece.

In “Luca della Robbia’s Singing
Gallery,” we are given an example of how everything has a profundity and a
flow, a movement of past and future attached to it or buried within:

Luca sees he is not alone in his
longing

to free the rivers from the
stone every gliding
foot

his chisel strokes strokes feathers of
water in the bed

The sculptures of Robbia, even as
dried terra-cotta, are alive as effigies of the people they immortalize. They
have a past that sings and dances if we let our eyes focus and calm our minds,
we can see the haecceity sloshing within.

Music is a poignant measure behind
Afloat. The form contributes to a kind of syncopated melody that
attracts us to connote water with harmony, and there are countless references
to water as musical instrument, the most interesting being “Airborne,” the
concluding poem in the collection:

bone flute yet never thrilled with
song until human
breath

waking gave voice and lit to an upsurge dormant in

the marrow larynx turned syrinx in the throat of your

It is a striking visceral and
primordial image illuminating how unity is something that we are composed and
molded out of. Water being the simulacrum of unity, we are drawn that much
closer back to our lifeblood.

Humanity’s sad reality of
self-inflicted distance from water, from our history is something that is also
noticed in the slipstream. Reibetanz makes an example out of China’s 130
million migrant workers who do not have a place to settle. Video games, as a
consequence, become an escape mechanism from their perpetual nomadic lifestyles
in the poem “Liudong Renkou.” They are unable to establish roots or trace their
own. They are essentially “deaf to sound.”

Even in a geographical sense we
have uprooted ourselves. Ancient civilizations used to settle along rivers,
near a water source. They drank from rivers and cleaned themselves in rivers.
Now we have all moved inland away from water, away from clarity.

There is a lot of transcendence
happening in Reibetanz’s book. Poems such as “Sunthreads,” “Heavenly Upness,”
and “Arise and Stay” all bring about a kind of ethereal voice. In these poems,
water is trying to lead us to salvation, or maybe, nirvana. In “Sunthreads”
there is a double meaning, one of literal meaning and one of enlightenment:

still songs to sing beyond

the human

The “still songs” can be the
actual songs that will be sung for eternity by human yearning, or they can be
the songs that we hear when our minds are calm and the water is motionless,
when we can see something that is beyond our own egos. It takes a strong
appreciation of virtue to have such a clear outlook.

“Heaven lies about us in our
infancy” is perhaps one of his truest aphorisms. To truly appreciate Afloat,
you must be willing to take yourself back to pure thoughts. To pry open the
bottom where Reibetanz has buried pearls, you must be willing to forgo your
identity. Narcissus drowned trying to grab his reflection. If you want to avoid
the same fate and appreciate a fuller existence, you must look at the water and
see the water, not yourself. In this regard, Reibetanz has created, with Afloat, an earthly paradise where you
can lie among heaven.

Eternity and timelessness and how
they interact with death are cliché questions, exhausting with their inability
to be answered, but they can be contented. Reibetanz mentions a “drowned
river,” and death is a drowned river that we can “revive.” By accepting the
natural flux of water and its many representations and manifestations, we can
revive ourselves. We can content ourselves with the notion that by being a part
of this immense and perennial existence of life, we will never die. Contained
within in this book is a supreme dialogue with the senses and what it means to
be at peace and understand the natural world.

John McCarthy’s poetry and fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming
in, Salamander, The First Line, Popshot, The Conium
Review, and The Lindenwood Review, among others. He lives in
Springfield, Illinois where he is the Assistant Editor of Quiddity
International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program. He has been a regional
judge for the national Poetry Out Loud recitation contest and volunteers at the
Vachel Lindsay Home. His website: johnmccarthylit.com